We provide a comprehensive study on the cross-sectional predictability of corporate bond returns using big data and machine learning. We examine whether a large set of equity and bond characteristics drive the expected returns on corporate bonds. Using either set of characteristics, we find that...

Markowitz's mean-variance portfolio optimization is either inefficient or impossible when the number of assets becomes relatively large. To overcome this difficulty, we propose several component-wise boosting learning methods that, in a linear regression specification, can iteratively select the...